


Crowns Of Blood And Bone

by raendown



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, for once Kakashi isn't the biggest dick head in town, same age au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 11:22:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15387690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raendown/pseuds/raendown
Summary: He hates and hates and hates until he loves her, slowly and in small pieces.





	Crowns Of Blood And Bone

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for eruditeempress on tumblr, the third place winner of my 1500 Followers Giveaway.

She doesn’t like him, that much is obvious. Kakashi eyes the young woman from across the room without bothering to try and hide it. There is little point when she is staring straight back at him with a completely blank expression which somehow conveys the world of pain she quite clearly wishes to rain down upon him. He isn’t exactly offended though; the feeling is entirely mutual.

Knowing that his new teammate has been rescued from ROOT makes less impact when he knows her ‘rescue’ hadn’t been entirely voluntary. Shutting down Danzo’s organization was possibly the smartest decision the Sandaime had ever made, one which Kakashi hadn’t truly believed the man was strong enough to go through with, but it has also left numerous messes to deal with in the aftermath. Among those messes are the human shadows who have been raised from infancy in their shadowy organization and never known another life. Some of them are coping well. Others, like Sakura, are not.

Now Kakashi is stuck with an extra member on his team and tasked with integrating her back in to regular society as best as he can. He would question the decision to put him, of all people, in charge of someone else’s mental health if he weren’t aware that every team now has at least one or two of these strange new additions to deal with. It’s only been a couple of weeks but Sakura is proving to be incredibly competent in solo combat, though wildly incompetent in several other areas. To be frank, she does play well with others.

It isn’t as though she questions his orders. Sakura has been raised her entire life to follow orders to the letter on pain of death and now that the Hokage himself has declared Kakashi her new minder she has yet to push back against any of his decisions. On the other hand she seems almost to search for ways to be deliberately difficult while still doing as she is asked. If he tells her to watch the target she will – but she will not report their movements, nor will she support her team if they fall under attack. She is used to fighting alone. Defending her teammates appears to be a foreign concept to her.

Sometimes Kakashi wonders who is the more broken, him or her. Is it better to drown in an overload of negative emotions or is it better to have none at all? He might ask her opinion if he thought she could properly comprehend the answer.

Obito’s eye feels too big inside his skull as Kakashi deliberately turns his attention away and pretends to ignore her. It won’t fool her but that isn’t the point.

-

Her mind is surprisingly sharp whenever she manages to actually open her mouth and say something. Kakashi despises it. The sound of her voice is soft and lilting, so completely at odds with her dead expression and brutal competency in a fight.

Even the way she exists rubbed at him the wrong way. She takes up so little physical space with her average height and slim physique and yet she fills every single room she walks in to. Kakashi feels her there without having to use any of his senses. He knows she is in a room before he’s even fully opened a door just by the chill that settles at the base of his spine and the way his jaw instinctively clenches, like the stench of her hatred can somehow reach his nose even before the deceptively floral scent of her hair.

Trying to think with the smell of soft flowers in his nose is becoming increasingly difficult lately.

“Another mission, kids,” he murmurs to the room at large, doing his best not to look directly at her; maybe for once he might be able to hold on to a good mood for a whole entire day. “Pack your things, we leave in an hour.”

While the rest of his team nods politely and turns back to their conversations, Sakura stands from where she has been perched in the corner and moves towards the door. He notices that she is staring directly at him as she walks and he holds his ground just to see if she will ask him to move. His answer comes in the petite shoulder that crashes in to his with the same amount of force a falling house might have.

“Out of my way…taichou.” The pause before her acknowledgement of his authority is what truly irks him and he hates that she already knows what buttons to press.

“You could try saying excuse me,” he says in a deliberately mild tone. When he peeks over his shoulder at her retreating form, she hasn’t even bothered to look back let alone respond to his useless statement. He hates that she knows that will bother him too.

His nose wrinkles under his mask and his teeth gnash together until Tenzou wanders up to pat him consolingly on the shoulder.

“I’m going to live to regret getting myself involved,” his friend mutters, “but if you want my opinion then I think you let her get under your skin a bit too easily. She’s a dick. Get over it. Lots of people are dicks, Kakashi, and one of those people is you.”

“Funny, I don’t remember asking for that opinion,” Kakashi growls but Tenzou only shrugs.

“Well you got it anyway.”

An orphan from infancy, Tenzou grew up in one of the state funded orphanages within Konoha, a member of the ANBU black ops since he turned four and it was discovered he possessed the mokuton through some latent Senju ancestry. He is Kakashi’s closest friend and the one person who isn’t afraid of setting his captain’s head on straight whenever Kakashi gets a big too big for his boots – or when he falls in to one of his maudlin depressions and starts moaning about the world hating him again.

Heading out the door to follow behind their newest teammate, Tenzou looks back at him with his already large eyes wide and falsely innocent. “Are you sure you don’t want to pull her pigtails and call her a stupid head?”

“We’re not _children_ ,” Kakashi protests. “Careful or I’ll stick you on second watch every night!”

Just like their other teammate, Tenzou doesn’t so much as grant him the dignity of a response. Kakashi grumbles under his breath about betrayal and mutiny as he goes after both of them.

-

Months pass, missions come and go, and the only constant in Kakashi’s life are the members of his team. Some days he spares a thought to wonder where Itachi is and whether or not he’s doing well. He stamps those thoughts out when he can, not wanting to spare time or energy for a boy who betrayed his own village.

When he isn’t thinking about wayward teammates or the people he’s lost along the path of life, Kakashi’s mind is occupied with Sakura, always Sakura. The pink of her hair is obnoxious the way it draws his eye in battle. He despises how many times now he has accidentally recorded her with his Sharingan rather than pay attention to his own opponent. When he lays in bed at night it takes but a single whim to bring up the smooth rotation of her shoulder as she rears back to punch out a man’s solar plexus, the barest quiver of her thigh muscles as she falls from fifteen feet in the air and lands with perfect balance, even the tiny shape of her fist when it cracks the earth open beneath her.

He isn’t sure why he replays these images again and again. When he’s angry he fancies that he’s studying her movements for possible weaknesses to exploit the day she finally tries to drag his teeth out one by one. Other times he finds himself filled with a strange curiosity and closes his eyes to watch the memories, memorizing them all over again until he finds some new detail he hasn’t bothered to pay attention to before.

That there is always something new about Sakura baffles him. How can there be anything new about her when she is plain and unchanging? Behind the mask of the bear her face never shows more expression that a blank disinterest. Outside of her uniform she dons training blacks, only ever inside headquarters at home. She eats her food slowly, one bite at a time, never adding sauce or garnish of any kind. It drives him up the wall. What he wouldn’t give to see her step out of the perfect mold she fits herself in to just one time, to break away from the expected and do something new.

So how it is that he continuously discovers new details about her? As she shatters a man’s kneecaps Kakashi notes that her toenails are all perfectly filed down to the same length. When she takes first watch and sits with her back to the rest of them he lets his eyes skim over the shape of the muscles in her shoulders, almost startled by how developed they are. Until now he’s thought most of her strength must be augmented by her chakra control and it is an oddly pleasant surprise to see that some of it is simply natural muscle. Why he cares is beyond him and he tears his eyes away before anyone else can note his unnecessary staring.

Five minutes later he tells himself just one more look.

It’s a lie.

-

When she finds him he is suffocating, no lungs to draw air and no heart to pump the blood through his veins. Or, that’s what it feels like at least. The nightmares always feel like this.

Upright on his futon, sheets twisted around his restless body, Kakashi stares with wild eyes at the figure crouched in his window. Sakura doesn’t look particularly interested to know why he sleeps in his kitchen rather than the perfectly serviceable bedroom just down the hall. He’s grateful she doesn’t ask him to explain himself but too distracted to note that it’s the first positive emotion he’s had towards her beyond a creepy amount of curiosity.

“Sandaime-sama wishes to see us both,” she tells him in her usual flat tone. What is unusual is the tilt of her head that takes in the sweat on his face, the rapid thundering of the pulse in his neck, the exposed whites of his eyes and the way he heaves for air like a man drowning.

“Okay,” he gasps. It’s probably the lack of any snarky comment that draws her attention.

“You are unwell. If you are unable to complete the mission–”

“No,” he cuts her off sharply. “I’m fine. I’m not ill.”

Hidden behind a mask as they are, he still feels her eyes boring in to him. “Emotional turmoil,” she notes clinically. “A good shinobi never allows their emotions to overwhelm them.”

“Yeah well a good human being feels them every once in a while so what’s that make you?”

“How hurtful.” The flat delivery of her words might be mistaken for sarcasm if he could bring himself to believe she is capable of such.

Still a bit shaken from the nightmare, Kakashi blurts out his words before his mind can catch up to who this is with him or how little she cares. “I was dreaming about Rin. Sometimes I can still feel the way her heartbeat felt against my wrist and I hate it. It was slippery and warm and I _hate_ it.”

Completely motionless in the windowsill, Sakura observes him in silence until he catches his breath and lives to regret his hasty words.

“Never mind,” he mutters. The sheets rustle loudly in the silence until her words stop him.

“Blood does not wash off of human skin. We are all, each of us, stained from birth. Come. The Hokage awaits us. If you are not ill then you must do your duty.”

Moonlight catches the pink of her hair, like watered down bloody froth falling like silk around her head, and Kakashi can’t help but agree with her. All humans come in to the world covered in blood. It is a shinobi’s fate to never be clean again. He wonders how much blood she has bathed in to come out the other side with hair dyed pink and a heart with nothing left in it.

It isn’t until he has extracted himself from the blanket, dressed, and crept out in to the night that he gives any thought to how out of character it is for her offer such poetic sounding words, words with no practical purpose. Were it anyone else he might think she has tried to comfort him but that’s a silly thought, easily dismissed. She barely cares for her own life, has been trained _not_ to care about those around her. The idea of her taking the time to offer him soothing words to help him calm down is a ridiculous one.

Still, the mission they are sent away on goes more smoothly than any other has before. Kakashi attributes it to their growing knowledge of each other’s style rather than any possibility that he might be getting attached.

-

Watching her take a life is like watching the shinobi equivalent of an intricate dance, a performance he could watch unending and never get bored. Her steps are sure, always perfectly placed, and her body is always where she needs it to be. Her fists make perfect arcs in the air while her back bows to make way for the blades sailing over her head. If only she were more expressive she would make the perfect candidate for undercover work posing as a graceful courtesan.

Even the small bits of other people that cling to her form only serve to make her more of an image captured in time, more than the monster she is, that they all are. Her black gloves are covered in blood, fragments of shattered rib dust through her hair, and there is what looks suspiciously like brain matter draped across the toe of her left boot. She looks like what he imagines a goddess of death might look like, eyes focused and intent without a hint of mercy for those she strikes down. Death, the equalizer of men, who comes for all without discrimination and takes without care for what gets left behind.

He memorizes her for perhaps the hundredth time and then turns back to the woman trying to remove his spleen with a broken naginata, fingers open and bleeding where they grip the blade but fighting onwards despite the pain she must be feeling. If she weren’t his enemy he thinks he might feel sympathy but instead all he feels is her flesh against his own when he slides his hand through her chest, guided by lightning until the ending of her life beats frantically against his wrist as so many others have before.

When it’s over he pushes her corpse away from himself and watches it slump to the ground. Sakura watches him; he can see her from the corner of his still active Sharingan. There’s a tilt to her head that he cannot decipher and the mask she never bothered to unclip from her belt stares at him too with its hollow eyes.

At first he thinks she means to simply stare at him until he moves again but then she speaks and he realizes that his hands are shaking.

“You do not like to use that jutsu,” she states, an observation rather than a question yet he answers just the same.

“No. I don’t.”

“You use it anyway.”

“It’s efficient.”

“Ah.” Her head returns to an upright position and nods once. “That I can understand.”

Kakashi looks from his hands to her, brows pulling together and glad for the double masks that hide the bewilderment plain in his expression. “You were trying to understand me?” he asks incredulously. Her expression does not change but there is something about the way her lids fall half closed, not quite the same narrowed eyed look she gives in irritation but not quite deep thought either.

Confusion, he thinks, and marvels at the novelty of it.

“Is that not what teammates are expected to do – understand one another?”

“Oh, are we teammates now?” Kakashi huffs. The familiarity of their snarky interactions is a comfort. “And here I thought the rest of us were just the nameless canon fodder you had been burdened with by his Hokage-ness.”

“All shinobi are nameless canon fodder,” she replies flatly.

Then she shakes the blood off her gloves and turns to leave while Kakashi gapes after her. “Did you just tell a joke!? Wait, get back here, that’s a serious question! Do you even know how!?”

She keeps walking away and he never gets his answer.

-

Tenzou is somewhere out there in the forest and it’s impossible to tell if the trees are creaking in the wind of the storm or if that is him fighting for his life. Lightning flashes across the sky, illuminating the dark battle ground for a single moment. It’s enough for even Kakashi’s regular eye to memorize the sight of the carnage around him and feel the nausea rise up in the back of his throat. This is his life, he thinks. This is all he is meant for.

He doesn’t want it.

He wants more than this.

He has never deserves more.

Sometimes he wishes he were part of the regular forces, able to go on simple mission with less certainty of death, that he didn’t have to spend every day of his life mired in shadows and nightmares. Right now is one of those times. How much longer will he survive this pace? Eight years is a long time to serve in ANBU but he doesn’t remember how to exist in any other patterns.

His body jolts when Sakura lands on the branch beside him, bringing his attention to her. For the first time since they met he feels jealous of her. The emptiness he had always hated must be incredibly peaceful.

“You feel too much,” she tells him with the air of someone noting the color of fresh painted walls.

“And you feel nothing,” he snaps back. “Must be _nice_.”

“What I feel is the rain. We should find shelter.”

“Tenzou is still out there!”

“He will find his way to us or he will not. We should still find shelter.”

Kakashi snarls at her. He might be jealous, intrigued, slowly growing attached like a cancerous growth on a host he didn’t even want to infect, but in this moment he hates again. It’s as ugly of a feeling as it always has been. “I will not abandon my friends.”

“I have no friends to abandon. Shelter, taichou.”

“You have comrades!” he explodes. Anger runs hot through his veins, burning away the cold terror that froze him to his perch only moments ago. “We’re a team, damn it! We would never abandon you but you don’t give half a fuck about us, do you? A team is a family and I _will not abandon Tenzou_. You find shelter if you want, Haruno. I’m going to find my friend.”

He pushes off from the branch and lets his body free fall, raindrops stinging his face until he bunches his legs and kicks off the trunk of another tree. Sakura’s chakra remains stationary behind him for a long enough time that he almost cannot sense her anymore before she finally begins to move.

At first he thinks she had taken his advice to seek shelter on her own. She moves in the same direction as him and he thinks she must be headed towards the caves he just passed.

When she finds him again he is carrying Tenzou’s exhausted body across his back, one leg dragging from the hit he had taken for his friend, soaked through with blood even more so than the rain still coming down in torrents. She says nothing as she relieves him of his burden, only points the way back towards the caves. Kakashi would thank her but instead he passes out for lack of chakra.

He wakes up somewhere dry, rolls over, and marvels that all of his wounds have been healed. Since when do any of them know how to heal? They’re ANBU; all they know is killing.

-

“You lied to the Hokage.”

Kakashi stops walking and sighs. “I didn’t lie. Omitting certain details is not lying. I told him all the information pertinent to the success of our mission.”

“Lying by omission is still a lie.”

“He really doesn’t need to know every single detail of what we do. Should I have told him what we ate for breakfast every day? Which underwear I put on this morning?”

“You believe that I am a danger to your team; you should have told him that.”

“Just because you can’t stand us doesn’t mean I’m giving you an out so easily.” Kakashi finally turns to glare at her over the edge of his cloth mask. “I meant what I said. The rest of us on this team, we don’t abandon our comrades and for better or for worse you are one of our comrades. Whether that means something or nothing to you doesn’t matter to us. We’re going to protect you anyway.”

Sakura stares at him like she doesn’t understand. He wonders if it’s his words or just him that she doesn’t get – or humanity in general.

“I am supposed to say thank you, I suppose.” She sounds unsure. It’s a question, he realizes, and it’s enough to startle him out of the impending hissy fit.

“Not necessary,” he says.

He counts the seconds. It is nearly half a minute before her brilliant green eyes look away from his and she continues walking down the hall, just long enough for him to remember their shade, their shape, the way she blinks, all of it playing back inside his mind as he sits in a tree later and pretends to read his book. He wonders if she knows that she is beautiful.

-

Wherever he goes there is a pointed gaze following him, sharp on the back of his neck. Kakashi thinks he would hate it a little more if it were anyone else. But it is only Sakura and he’s pretty used to it at this point. At least now there seems to be some kind of purpose to the scrutiny, something more than just the distrusting gaze of an outsider looking in he had suffered when they first met.

For whatever reason, she seems to have chosen him to mimic in her attempts at pretending to be human. She’s got poor taste but it’s better than the empty shell he’s known her to be so he’s certainly not going to discourage the choice.

They’re posing as bodyguards for Tenzou, who looks extremely uncomfortable in the robes of a well-off textile merchant. Infiltration isn’t usually one of the missions given to their team but the target is high profile and rumored to be very strong. Sakura keeps one eye on Tenzou and one eye on her team captain, mimicking every move he makes. If he shakes hands then so does she; if he remains quiet so does she; when he smiles benignly she attempts to do the same.

It’s the first time Kakashi has ever seen her face move and the muscles of her face are clearly unused to it. Still, the expression suits her more than he expects it to. One of the merchants takes the time to mention so to her and the perplexed way she stares over at Kakashi, questioning how she is meant to respond, is the absolute highlight of his day. Laughing at her reaction is an excellent distraction from the hot flash of jealousy which runs through him. He is grateful. Kakashi does not want to be jealous. Jealousy would imply he cares, that he wants, and neither of those things would be ideal directed at someone like Haruno Sakura. He likes to think he’s smarter than that.

Sakura smiles again like she is testing a new weapon and Kakashi looks away. Her teeth are blades slipping past the walls around his heart, finding cracks in the armor he wears to protect his emotions. It’s here and now in a moment so _unmomentous_ that he understands he’s been doomed from the very start.

-

He hates and hates and hates until he loves her, slowly and in small pieces. They are both of them shattered mockeries of humanity and he wants to glue them back together in to a single work of art that only he will find beautiful.

It hurts but so have many other things. As he always does, he forges on.

-

She finds him in the daytime, lounging in a pool of sunlight with nothing better to do than to sit and recover from the wounds of their most recent mission. Kakashi can sense her when she approaches his window without hesitation. He can’t imagine her ever hesitating to do anything.

“You feel too much,” she tells him. He blinks over at the small machine dosing him with morphine and thinks that he doesn’t feel much of anything right now.

“So you’ve told me before,” he mumbles instead.

“Teach me.”

Kakashi stares at her, his head floating in cotton clouds and a dopey smile on his unmasked face. “To what?”

“You express emotion so easily. You feel so easily. Teach me how to do as you do.”

It’s probably the morphine but his attention slides away from her words to focus on the ethereal crown of light around her head, no doubt from the window at her back even if his drug-addled mind starts thinking about angels and death again. If he were a god he would give her a crown made of bones hard like her eyes and weave it through with flowers as soft as her voice.

What comes out of his mouth is hardly an answer to her request.

“I think I’m in love with you,” he whispers. She steps closer, intent.

“I want that,” she tells him. “I want to feel. I want to love. Teach me.”

Kakashi dares to reach out and pull her down until her face is level with his own. When he kisses her she lets him, her lips unmoving against his own but not resisting either. She tastes like the soldier pills they eat on missions to maintain calorie intake.

“Did that feel good?” he asks, eyes closed to savor the images he sees inside his mind, memories he has played back a hundred times and more.

“I don’t know,” she tells him honestly. “Will this teach me how to feel?”

“Maybe, maybe not. How about this: let me love you. You like to learn by example, don’t you?”

“Will you kiss me again?” There is honest to god curiosity in her voice and Kakashi shivers in the warm sunshine, opening his eyes at last to see the way her eyes look at him as though he is the only thing in the room.

Smiling again, he asks, “Do you want me to?”

“Yes. I think so.”

-

It takes the better part of an hour to teach her how to kiss.

It takes the better part of a year until she smiles at him quietly of her own volition when she thinks he cannot see her.

It takes the better part of his humanity away when he is relieved of his duties as an ANBU agent, forced in to training a team of the next generation. To leave her behind feels like leaving behind his soul.

She follows. And that is the moment when Kakashi realizes that she loves him too, though it takes the better part of three more years before she finds the words to say so.


End file.
